5th Annual Turkish Film Festival to shatter stereotypes

Three graduate students are on a mission to dispel misrepresentations of Turkish women through the power of film in the fifth annual Bloomington Turkish Film Festival.

The films will run at 8 p.m. every night from Thursday to April 4 in Ballantine Hall room 109. The festival will feature six films with English subtitles.

The festival was first organized in 2005 by Abbas Karakaya and Burcu Karahan, who were Turkish doctoral students in Central Eurasian Studies, according to the event’s Web site.

The event is organized every year by friends who hope to carry on the tradition.

Graduate student Ozan Say said the tradition has been successful thus far.

“Every year, three or four new Turkish grad students form a committee and re-organize the festival as others leave to pursue other ambitions,” he said. “We all live around each other and are still in contact. It’s refreshing to get new ideas going every year.”

This year, the festival’s theme is “Women in Turkish Cinema.” When it came to deciding what the theme would be, grad students and committee members Say, Ihsan Topaloglu and Sinem Siyahhan sat down and watched a series of Turkish films depicting women in various lights.

“In most Turkish cinema, women are typically portrayed one way,” Siyahhan said. “With the festival, we were hoping to show films that captured the spirit of all types of women in Turkey.”

One way of doing that was by showing a range of film genres, such as documentaries and cult films, for the first time. This year, the festival is showing a cult film called “The Girl with the Red Scarf” and a documentary called “The Play,” according to a Turkish Student Association press release.

Siyahhan said the documentary, which has a female director, empowers women to express themselves in ways that don’t limit them.

“Ideas about women are changing,” she said. “They are becoming more conscious of who they are and who they want to be in this world.”

Topaloglu welcomed the challenges of selecting the films to be presented. He said he wants to show other sides of eastern Europe.

“Many films of eastern Europe can be kind of depressing and dark,” he said. “I just wanted to pick films for this year’s festival that were more colorful.”

Another way of representing Turkish women in various lights was to show films that shattered stereotypes.

“There is an idea that women in Turkey are always submissive,” Say said. “I thought it was important that we show that many Turkish women are also engaged in politics and have different conceptions of love and what it means to them across transnational borders.”

Say, Siyahhan and Topaloglu said they all hope to introduce IU to new perspectives that will open student minds to other cultural messages. The event is free and open to the public.

“Just like any country, Turkey has its problems,” Siyahhan said. “It is important, however, to understand that within any culture, in any country, there is always diversity.”